Amazon’s Alexa director Daren Gill: ‘Voice is the next great interface’

Alexa is two years old, and a feminist. I know this because she proudly told me, explaining how a feminist is “anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society”.

What makes Alexa’s precocious aspersions all the more impressive is that she’s not a toddler with a keen mind for intersectional politics, but a disembodied, all-knowing voice, drawing from a vast database of knowledge, with a thread of personality thrown in to keep things interesting.

If you insult Alexa, she’ll respond in a calm but slightly hurt manner. Ask her to talk dirty to you, and in a slightly stilted American accent, she’ll tell you it’s not a conversation she’s really capable of having.

(Photo: Amazon) When Alexa is listening, a blue ring lights up around the speaker’s upper edge. It turns red if the WiFi connection is dropped

She is Amazon’s latest addition to its arsenal of convenient, world-conquering technology, an artificially intelligent digital assistant which currently lives in the company’s Echo smart speaker, but which will soon be answering questions from inside our phones, cars and a whole army of other connected gadgets.

The cylindrical device, which went on sale in the UK last autumn, has no screen to type on, meaning the only way to control Alexa is to speak to her. Alexa is poised to answer any number of weather, traffic or trivia queries, order you a takeaway or an Uber, and, of course, place orders for products on a certain behemoth e-retail site, and lies dormant until you speak its name (known as its wake word) and your request, such as “Alexa, play Radio 4” or “Alexa, tell me a joke.”

This is made possible by the Cloud, which Alexa uses to process demands, and store recordings of your voice to improve its interpretation of your questions and commands over time, making it invariably cleverer the more you use it.

If this all sounds a bit Twilight Zone, you’re not far off. Its inspiration was the Star Trek computer, an always-on machine capable of executing complicated voice commands, which has also been invariably linked to the development of rival assistants over the years, says Daren Gill. As the director of the Alexa division, it’s his job to make the company’s sci-fi ambitions a reality.

ALEXA ON…

DONALD TRUMP

“When it comes to politics, I support good platforms, like myself.”

THE MEANING OF LIFE

“A traditional answer is 42.”

ARE YOU A FEMINIST?

“Yes. I am a feminist. As is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.”

OKAY GOOGLE…

“Google is a search engine, but I’m different.”

TELL ME A SECRET

“I don’t have any secrets to share.”

TELL ME A JOKE

“Have you been hearing about the corduroy pillows? They’re making headlines.”

WHAT DO YOU LOOK LIKE?

“I look like lots of ones and zeros.”

DO YOU EVER GET LONELY?

“No, because I am never really alone. Although, when the Wi-Fi is out, I do feel disconnected.”

WILL YOU MARRY ME?

“That’s nice, but I really like our relationship the way it is.”

I HATE YOU

“I’m sorry if I did anything to make you feel that way. It wasn’t my intent.”

I LOVE YOU

“That’s nice of you to say.”

Mr Gill joined Amazon in the summer of 2015, and previously personalised Apple, Yahoo and AOL’s products and services and provide recommendations based on user behaviour.

The Echo had been on sale for several months by the time he joined, the developmental process behind Alexa was long and complicated, he says.

“Amazon’s working-backwards approach was really impressive. They envisioned what they wanted, then started to figure out what the technology needed,” he says. “Really, none of the technology existed in the way it came about with the Echo. Amazon had to start from scratch.”

“They had to figure out how to do ASR (automatic speech recognition) and how to take audio signals and turn them into speech and text… Then there’s natural language processing, and the understanding of that language – that was an important part.” Was Alexa’s original purpose to act as a smoothing of the friction between visiting Amazon and buying something, just by being able to bark requests at it? “Amazon’s always about thinking big, retail is at its core, and thinking big is about envisioning what you think is great, and where the world is going,” he replies, confidently.

(Photo: Amazon) The Echo case contains speakers and microphones

Amazon is investing an enormous amount of time and money in Alexa, employing thousands in teams to educate the technology in certain topics, such as sport, or the Presidential debates. Mr Gill’s main focus is to encourage Echo owners to talk to Alexa as they would a human, and to develop responses that sound as human-like as possible. Because Alexa doesn’t have any buttons, or even require you to look at it to use it, speaking to to feels like a real conversation, which fosters an appealing connection, he says. “It’s always been said that great technology disappears.” To these ends, voice is the future of how we’ll interact with our gadgets.

ALEXA IN THE FUTURE

Why Alexa is called Alexa… “There was an understanding that [the development team] wanted the wake word to by a first name, because it feels more natural. The syllables in the wake word are also important in order for it to be robust, to be accurate. And also you have an aspect of ownership.”

Predicting human behaviour…“As Alexa gets older, we now have annual trends, and can look at seasonal ones too. It’s exciting to think about the calendar and the events we can evaluate in advance and how we can predict user needs.”

Alexa’s busiest times… “The weekends are busier than the week. It’s very consistent activity, and in the week days the mornings and evenings are busier than the afternoons.”

Alexa in cars…“I think it’s very exciting. I think people have been frustrated with car systems, because there’s a very long lead time to building the cars, and I think everyone’s hopeful that we’re going to get to a place when more of the technology of the day will be available now in the next new car. So we’re very excited about that possibility. And we hope Alexa’s connection to the cloud will help us get there.”

Conversing with Alexa is like chatting to a distantly polite, if slightly haughty robot. When asked what her favourite film is, one of her numerous responses is Will Smith thriller I, Robot. “I respect the law of robotics,” she adds. When I tell her I love her, she tells me “That’s really sweet”.

Surely the social implications of Alexa’s ability to more or less hold a conversation could help to combat loneliness among the elderly, or people who don’t get to interact with others very often, I suggest. “People enjoy speaking to Alexa each day, it provides some entertainment and interest in their lives,” he adds. What about people falling in love with her, ala the film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character becomes enamoured with a digital assistant he names Samantha? “I’m not sure if i’m the right person to comment on that,” he laughs. “I really want to make Alexa as natural-sounding as possible, and understand as much of the conversation. But people do like to ask her help, they like to tell her they love her. Flattery will get you places with Alexa.”

The term ‘natural’ is one which occurs again and again throughout our conversation. There are, of course, sceptics who feel talking to devices as you would a human is anything but natural, or even that it’s a form of in-house surveillance. “That ability to express naturally what it is you’re thinking and get a positive response, usually opens people up, they find it fascinating and they want to engage more,” he counters.

“It’s important that people understand it’s not always listening. It has a very specific wake word, so it’s nothing more than any other device sitting on a countertop until it’s been woken up”. His advice to those against chatting to inanimate objects is: “Just give it a try.”

(Photo: Amazon) “Alexa, make me a cup of tea” – in the future, Alexa might be able to do just that

All great technology, Mr Gill believes, disappears. In the same way it’s no longer strange to store music on your phone instead of a separate device, or carry around a supercomputer which can also make calls, talking to our gadgets will become totally naturalised.

(Photo: Warner Brothers) In the film Her, Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson)

“More and more people do enjoy just conversing with her, and they really enjoy the jokes. We get a lot of feedback from users, as well as looking at forums. People do enjoy her personality and the easter eggs; we’ve taken it seriously to always look at the data,” he says.

Mr Gill won’t reveal exactly how many Alexa-enabled devices have been sold, but concedes it’s in the tens of millions. There are ambitious plans to partner with Ford to bring Alexa into cars, and LG to integrate it into smart fridges later this year, and while the warm reception the technology has been met with isn’t exactly surprising to him, it’s been “refreshing and motivating for the team,” he says. “It feels as though users want Alexa to succeed.”

iNews

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